Intersubjectivity

El antirrepresentacionalismo de Hegel y su concepción del conocimiento como praxis intersubjetiva

by Hector Ferreiro

Este artículo aparecerá publicado próximamente en una antología de trabajos sobre la filosofía de Hegel editada por Daniel Brauer en la Editorial Prometeo, Buenos Aires, 2012.

The unspoken side of mutual adjustment: Understanding intersubjective negotiation in small professional service firms

by Robert Wapshott

Accepted for publication in the International Small Business Journal,
Co-authored with Oliver Mallett (Durham Business School, Durham University)

This article critically analyses intersubjective negotiation in the context of small firm employment relationships.... more This article critically analyses intersubjective negotiation in the context of small firm employment relationships. These employment relationships are generally acknowledged as ad hoc, contested and negotiated, producing mutual adjustment between owner-managers and employees. We present detailed qualitative empirical material from three small professional service firms and argue that explicit instances of formal or informal negotiation cannot be understood as discrete events disassociated from ongoing, everyday intersubjective negotiations. The negotiation of employment relationships, especially in ambiguity-intensive small professional service firms, frequently draws on the perception of other actors’ value or interests rather than on any direct engagement with them. This intersubjective guesswork underlying mutual adjustment is potentially dysfunctional as outcomes can arise that satisfy neither owner-manager nor employee interests. We suggest that understanding employment relationships in small professional service firms requires greater focus on individuals’ perceptions and the ways in which their relative positions are structured in intersubjective mutual (mis)recognition.

The unspoken side of mutual adjustment: Understanding intersubjective negotiation in small professional service firms

by Oliver Mallett

International Small Business Journal, forthcoming. Co-authored with R. Wapshott

This article critically analyses intersubjective negotiation in the context of the small firm employment relationship,... more This article critically analyses intersubjective negotiation in the context of the small firm employment relationship, generally acknowledged as ad hoc, contested and negotiated, producing mutual adjustment between owner-managers and employees. Drawing on detailed qualitative empirical material from three small professional service firms, we argue that explicit instances of formal or informal negotiation cannot be understood as discrete events disassociated from ongoing, everyday intersubjective negotiations. The negotiation of employment relationships and working practices, especially in ambiguity-intensive small professional service firms, frequently draws on the perception of other actors' value or interests rather than on any direct engagement with them. This intersubjective guesswork underlying mutual adjustment is potentially dysfunctional as outcomes can arise that satisfy neither owner-manager nor employee interests. We suggest that understanding employment relationships in small professional service firms requires greater focus on individuals’ perceptions and the ways in which their relative positions are structured in intersubjective mutual (mis)recognition.

Technicity and publicness

by Stephen Read

in Footprint 3. Special issue: P.A. Healy & B. O’Byrne (eds.), Phenomenology in Architecture and Urbanism. pp. 7-22

Heidegger’s space, with its emphasis on the disclosure of entities in settings of mutually referring entities, and the... more Heidegger’s space, with its emphasis on the disclosure of entities in settings of mutually referring entities, and the integration of settings and action, requires us to think carefully about issues like the identities and being of people and things and their relations with each other in a realm of plurality. All entities are captured in webs of co-reference which make their relations between themselves and to ourselves a very public matter. These webs themselves are at the same time the very channels by which we know and access all things, and relations of power become built into them which affect the ways we know things and the possibilities we see for acting. This paper explores and reviews issues of technicity, intersubjectivity, and plurality in relation to Heidegger’s thinking, in order to begin the process of outlining an urban space of the settings ‘between men’ for coherence and action, and to define a direction for further research on urban space and place.

You Are Not Your Brain: Against "Teaching to the Brain"

by Gregory Nixon

Published in the *International Handbook of Academic Research and Teaching: Proceedings of Intellectbase International Consortium*, vol 22, Spring 2012, San Antonio, TX, USA, 298-306.

Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in... more Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community.

W. J. Korab-Karpowicz, Rethinking Philosophy: An Essay on Philosophy, Myth and Science, Philosophy Today (2002).

by W Julian Korab-Karpowicz

Philosophy defined as pursuit of wisdom can be understood as the desire to arrive at the ultimate knowledge - the... more Philosophy defined as pursuit of wisdom can be understood as the desire to arrive at the ultimate knowledge - the knowledge of the whole. But when it turns to be scientific and attempts to look at the world “objectively”, it arrives only at a knowledge of a part. What remains largely unquestioned about the world-view of modern science is its essence. The essence of scientific outlook is indifference. To place the world before us as an object of indifferent investigation is not an effective method of reaching truth about everything. Consequently, philosophy needs to follow its own path. Under the surface of illusion which results from scientific investigation there is a universal knowledge which arises from man’s devotional and affective engagement with the world. Philosophy can be regarded as a pursuit of the knowledge of the whole, but it is not the knowledge of the whole. The knowledge of the whole for which philosophy looks can be revealed in myth.

Politics and the Internet: A Phenomenological Critique

by Gregory Cameron

How Does Recognition Emerge from Nature? The Genesis of Consciousness in Hegel’s Jena Writings

by Italo Testa

Draft, forthcoming in “Critical Horizons”, Special Issue edited by J.-P. Deranty & H. Hikaeheimo, 2012

The paper proposes a reconstruction of some fragments of Hegel’s Jena manuscripts concerning the natural genesis of... more The paper proposes a reconstruction of some fragments of Hegel’s Jena manuscripts concerning the natural genesis of recognitive spiritual consciousness. On this basis it  will be argued that recognition has a foothold in nature. As a consequence, recognition should not be understood as a bootstrapping process, that is, as a self-positing and self-justifying normative social phenomenon, intelligible within itself and independently of anything external to it.

Anerkennung der Kunst/Anerkennung durch Kunst, in Christoph Asmuth (a cura di), Transzendentalphilosophie und Person. Leiblichkeit – Interpersonalität – Anerkennung. Bielefeld, Transcript-Verlag, 2007, pp. 337-350.

by Alessandro Bertinetto

Intersubjectivity and Evaluations of Justice

by Gustavo Pereira

The capability approach assigns a central role to the contexts within which social interactions take place, which make... more The capability approach assigns a central role to the contexts within which social interactions take place, which make individual liberty achievable. However, an auxiliary concept is necessary to explain the contexts of collective action more accurately. In this paper I shall present Taylor’s concept of irreducibly social goods as a supplement to the capability approach. I shall also introduce the concept of hermeneutics as a strategy suitable for evaluating which capabilities are to be considered valid, as an alternative to aggregative methodologies. This conceptual development at the core of the capability approach demands to be framed by a normative criterion that enable us to distinguish between emancipatory and conservative contexts of social action; for that purpose I make use of the subject idealization that Honneth and Anderson present.

“Embodied Perceptions of Others as a Condition of Selfhood? Empirical and Phenomenological Considerations.”

by Kym Maclaren

Published in: Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 15, No. 8 (August 2008): 63-93.

Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant’s... more Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant’s initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from perceiving inanimate things. Until sufficient motor capacities have developed for exploring and perceptually disambiguating inanimate things, it is only in perceiving others who recognize her that the infant is able to realize herself as a self. As the physiological and behavioural evidence suggests, whereas inanimate things initially captivate and dispossess the young infant, other people return her to herself. This paper lends support to the ideas that humans are ontologically social beings, and that selfhood is socially conditioned rather than given with consciousness.

Prolegómenos a una teoría enactiva del conocimiento.

by Andrés Segovia Cuellar

What baboons, babies and Tetris players tell us about interaction: a biosocial view of norm-based social learning

by Stephen J. Cowley

This is a draft of a paper that appeared as:
Cowley, S.J. & MacDorman, K.F. (2006). What baboons, babies and Tetris players tell us about interaction: a biosocial view of norm-based social learning. Connection Science, 18/3, 363-378.

Could androids use movements to build relationships? For people relationships are created with the help of... more Could androids use movements to build relationships? For people relationships are created with the help of behavior-shaping norms, which infants begin to discover and manipulate by the third month. To build relationships, machines can also learn to exploit human reactions in real-time decision making. In the video game Tetris, for example, affect co-opts computer generated patterns to simplify cognitive tasks: norms mediate what Kirsh and Maglio (1994) term epistemic actions, which allow implicit knowledge to shape key pressing in ways that, given past games, are likely to be informative and valuable. Experts act to change their cognitive states by allowing the game’s higher-level states to constrain their lower-level actions. Since this process enables the development of expertise, we might expect it to be widespread. But it seems marginal in hamadryas baboons, although they use affect and complex norms. In humans, by contrast, infants use adults as cognitive resources in developing their epistemic abilities. This has engineering implications for android designers. Because androids can elicit epistemic actions, engineers need to develop an affect-sensitive interface. If successful at this, even rudimentary coaction may prompt people to report experiencing androids as both making choices and violating expectations.

On the evolution of declarative pointing

by Ingar Brinck

In human infants, imperative and declarative pointing are distinct communicative acts that rely on different cognitive... more In human infants, imperative and declarative pointing are distinct communicative acts that rely on different cognitive
capacities. Declarative pointing is an important precursor to language, seen from both an
evolutionary and a developmental perspective. Declarative pointing is functionally independent of affective
intersubjectivity, yet intimately related to it in development. It is argued that declarative pointing
allows for the mutual evaluation of joint objects of attention, and that this constitutes an evolutionary advantage to other forms of pointing. Interaffectivity and joint
attention to a distal object together constitute the prerequisites for using declarative pointing for the purpose of
evaluation. Mutual evaluation has the benefits of enhancing co-operation and enabling vicarious learning. It
also makes possible non-linguistic, active interrogation of other subjects about their attitudes to jointly attended
objects.

Introduction: Experience and Inquiétude

by Sarah Willen

Willen, Sarah S. & Don Seeman. 2012 “Introduction: Experience and Inquiétude.” In “Horizons of Experience: Reinvigorating Dialogue between Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Anthropologies.” Sarah S. Willen & Don Seeman, guest editors. Special Issue of Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. 40(1): 1-23.

In recent decades, human experience has become focus or frame for a wide variety of projects in psychological... more In recent decades, human experience has become focus or frame for a wide variety of projects in psychological anthropology and beyond. Like “culture,” which it arguably seeks to either qualify or displace, the concept of “experience” has generated its own interpretive literature, competing schools of analysis, and internal resistances. We propose that the anthropology of experience has achieved a degree of recognition and maturity that renders genealogical reflection, stocktaking, and agenda setting both possible and necessary.
Although the anthropology of experience, like experience itself, does not (and perhaps should not) lend itself to easy definition as a singular or unified theoretical paradigm, it does involve a fluid constellation of themes shared by what are traditionally regarded as parallel or divergent lines of inquiry: what might be glossed imperfectly as the phenomenological and psychoanalytic schools within sociocultural anthropology. Here we aim neither for na¨ıve synthesis nor a mathematical sum of parts, but for more adequate ways of depicting and making sense of what Dewey calls “the inclusive integrity of ‘experience.’” This will require more concerted attention to the sources of ethnographic inquiétude—the gaps, silences, limits, and opacities—that either preoccupy or remain overlooked within both traditions. [experience, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, phenomenological anthropology, psychoanalytic anthropology, inquiétude]

The New Aestheticism and Democratic Freedom

by Gregg Daniel Miller

“Emotional Metamorphoses: The Role of Others in Becoming-Oneself.”

by Kym Maclaren

Published in: Embodiment and Agency: New Essays in Feminist Philosophy, edited by Susan Sherwin, Letitia Meynell, and Sue
Campbell. Pennsylvania State University Press, (2009): 1-45.

“Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of ‘Letting Others Be’.”

by Kym Maclaren

Published in:  Chiasmi International:  Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought 4 (2002): 187-210.

Can social interaction constitute social cognition?

by Ezequiel Di Paolo

De Jaegher, H, Di Paolo, E. A. and Gallagher, S. (2010) Can social interaction constitute social cognition?, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(10), 441 – 447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.009.

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward... more An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction and distinguish the different explanatory roles – contextual, enabling and constitutive – it can play in social cognition. We show that interactive processes are more than a context for social cognition: they can complement and even replace individual mechanisms. This new explanatory power of social interaction can push the field forward by expanding the possibilities of scientific explanation beyond the individual.

Making Sense in Participation: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition

by Ezequiel Di Paolo

De Jaegher, H. and Di Paolo, E. A. (2008) Making sense in participation: An enactive approach to social cognition. In F. Morganti, A. Carassa, and G. Riva (eds) Enacting Intersubjectivity: A cognitive and social perspective to the study of interactions, IOS Press: Amsterdam, pp 33 – 47.